After supper, in the summer months, he would go out and work in the garden until it got too dark to see. With the shortages of food that "Victory Garden" was what fed us! Mom canned tomatoes, and green beans, made sour kraut, jams, jellies and preserves, that is, when we could get the sugar, which was rationed.

It was easier for us I guess, living in a small village, than for people who lived in the big cities. Nashville, Missouri was a little village of about 75 people in southwest Missouri. We had a two-block main street with two grocery stores, and a combined post office and barber shop. Mail was delivered to the post office twice a day. The NORTH mail came in the mornings and the SOUTH mail was delivered in the afternoon. There was no home delivery, everyone in this small town had to go to the post office and get their mail. No private boxes either. You had to ask the postmaster who stood behind a grilled area for your mail. The barber/postmaster had his chair set up in the back of the post office and would be setting in it if he didn't have a customer. He lived a couple of block away and rode a bicycle to and from work. One of the grocery stores sold gasoline. The town also had a welding shop. There were two churches and a two-room schoolhouse. The first four grades in the south room and the upper four grades in the north room. Later they combined them and had all eight grades in one room with one teacher. When I started first grade in 1941 there were two rooms. We lived in an old rock house just a block south of the school. It was the oldest house in town. Two rooms up and two rooms down. Later my Dad built two more rooms onto the east side of the house. I can remember waking up to the sound of the old gasoline engine that ran the washing machine, for we had no electricity then. Mom kept it on the back porch. In the wintertime she would roll it into the kitchen and in bad weather, hang the clothes on a line in the house to dry. That old machine motor would even shake the floor as it swished and swashed the clothes. My little brother had the mumps when he was about four years old. He said, "Mama, dat make my gaws hut!"

Mom had a big galvanized tub that she sat under the eve of the house to catch rainwater to wash the clothes in. We had a dug well where we pulled the water up in buckets to use for wash the clothes. It was hard water and she liked the soft rainwater best. She heated the water on top of the four-burner kerosene cook stove, and then carried it to the washing machine by buckets.

One sunny day in the spring Mom told us to pull the beets and wash them in a tub so she could can them the next morning. Not wanting to pull water up from the well we thought we would just wash them in the rainwater that was in the other tub. Mom was saving that water to wash the cloths and she was so mad at my brother and I that she gave us both a whipping. I think it was the hardest whipping she ever gave me. Some folks down the block had some tame rabbits. They were so cute. Dad let my brother and I buy a black rabbit. We went out to the cage one morning and she had babies! They grew and Dad let us put them in an old shed out back. Soon the baby's had MORE babies. We ended up with 28 rabbits. My brother and I had to get out and pull grass for them to eat. Dad was buying hay and pellets for them and it was getting expensive, so he killed one and Mom cooked it. My brother and I couldn't eat it. Once he sold one of them to a neighbor and we kids cried so much that he gave us the money and let us go and buy it back.

As kids we do things we wouldn't want our own children to do, I remember how my brother and I would climb up on the roof of the addition, then onto the steep roof of the two story part of our house, walking the peak of the roof like a tight rope walker when the 'ole maid' who lived down the road came hurrying through the gate to tell our mother that we were up on the roof. We didn't get a whipping but sure got a tongue-lashing, and didn't do that again!

Saturday was the day we went to town. The nearest big town was Pittsburgh Kansas. Morn would shop the "Dime Store" and Dad would shop the hardware store. My little brother always got a comic book. He was walking down the sidewalk behind Mom and I, looking at his comic book one day and when he looked up he had followed the wrong woman, thinking she was Mom. We looked back and he wasn't there and Mom panicked. We hurried up the street, looking this way and that, and there he was, not even aware that he was lost! We ran a bill for groceries at the little store in Nashville, and Mom would often ask me to run down to the store and get a can of beans or something. Now I had a sweet tooth that wouldn't quite! I would look in that glass case at those wonderful chocolate candy bars and say to the storekeeper - "and I'll have one of those butter fingers too." Then I would hurriedly eat it before I got home, dropping the wrapper on the path. Dad always paid the grocery bill at the end of the month, and that's when I got caught. I never got a whipping, but I guess I learned my lesson.

Everyone had to have stamps to buy shoes and gasoline. Once my brother Ron, three years younger, and I were playing with some of the neighbor kids a block from our house. Ron decided to take off his shoes and wade the water in the ditch. When we got back to the house he didn't have his shoes. We went back to find them and they were gone. My Dad was mad at me because I was supposed to be looking after him. He started to grab me and spank me, and I ran. That was the wrong thing to do when Dad was mad. He caught me and I got the whipping of my life. Just a few minutes later the neighbor lady came walking into our yard carrying Ron's shoes. She thought they were her gir’s shoes and had taken them home with her. I can look back on it now and understand why Dad was upset about Ron's lost shoes. He couldn't buy more shoes without more shoe stamps and Ron would have had no shoes until the next time shoe stamps were issued.

Our school sold 10-cent stamps for liberty bonds. How my Dad ever had enough money to give me to buy those Liberty Stamps I'll never know. He worked in the lead mines during the War. I ended up with my book filled but cashed it in before it matured. It was a Twenty Five Dollar Bond!

The atomic bomb was dropped on Aug 6th 1945. Each day we ran to the radio as news of the war was announced. It was August the 15th; the announcer on the radio was shouting that the Japanese had signed the treaty to end the war. He was reporting mass parades in the large cities around the United States to celebrate the end of the war. I thought we should have a parade too so I made my little brother and myself some Yankee doodle hats out of folded newspaper and put small flags into the top of them, then I took the little drum that was broken off a toy that belonged to my brother and he took his little horn and we marched - just the two of us - drumming and tooting as loud as we could, up the block to the school, past the two churches and around the block and down the two blocks of Main Street Nashville Missouri. Everyone came out to see what all the commotion was about. Two little kids - proud to be announcing at last, THE WAR WAS OVER!